reference to the Sermones ad populum, and the transformation theory of James Loder’, unpublished PhD thesis, University of Aberdeen. Preaching, of course, was not the sole vehicle of such transformations, nor were they, naturally, complete and without negative aspects. The negative influence of preaching is seen in its use in warmongering, as in the Crusades.
[7] This is, I am aware, a complex and contested matter. See Duncan Maclaren, 2004, Mission Implausible: Restoring Credibility to the Church, Carlisle: Paternoster, pp. 57–93, for a fascinating discussion of the persistence of religion in what is often called a ‘secularized’ society, and the openings this offers for a gospel that will transform individuals.
[8]Roger Standing, 2010, ‘Mediated Preaching: Homiletics in Contemporary British Culture’, in Geoffrey Stevenson (ed.), 2010, The Future of Preaching, London: SCM, pp. 9–26.
[9] She comments that this culture owes much not only to the Western philosophical emphasis on disputation and formal logic, but also to the militaristic language and ethos of the Christendom atmosphere of the universities, in which modern science came to birth: Deborah Tannen, 1998, The Argument Culture: Changing the Way we Argue and Debate, London: Virago, pp. 264–6, drawing on David Noble, 1992, A World without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western Science, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.
[10] Tannen, Argument Culture, p. 4 (my italics).
[11] See Joseph M. Webb, 2001, Preaching without Notes, Nashville: Abingdon; also his ‘Without Notes’, in Paul Scott Wilson (ed.), 2008, The New Interpreter’s Handbook of Preaching, Nashville: Abingdon, pp. 429–31.
[12] Tannen, Argument Culture, pp. 247–9.
[13] On this topic I am indebted especially to Stuart Blythe, 2009, ‘Open-Air Preaching as Radical Street Performance’ unpublished PhD thesis, University of Edinburgh.
[14] See Dave Tomlinson, 2008, Re-enchanting Christianity: Faith in an Emerging Culture, Norwich: Canterbury Press, pp. 15–33; Maggi Dawn, 1997, ‘You Have to Change to Stay the Same’, in Graham Cray et al., The Post-evangelical Debate, London: SPCK, pp. 35–56.
[15] For theological reflection on this subject see, for example, Peter Selby, 2009, Grace and Mortgage: The Language of Grace and the Debt of the World, 2nd edn, London: Darton, Longman & Todd.
[16] Michael Pasquarello III, 2005, Sacred Rhetoric: Preaching as a Theological and Pastoral Practice of the Church, Grand Rapids: Eerdmans.
[17] See for instance the quantity of references to them in Calvin’s Institutes of the Christian Religion.
[18] On this event see Timothy Clark, 1999, ‘Literature and the Crisis in the Concept of the University’, in David Fuller and Patricia Waugh (eds), The Arts and Sciences of Criticism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 217–37, here pp. 222–5.
[19] This division is especially associated with the name of J. P. Gabler. See Craig G. Bartholomew, 2005, ‘Biblical Theology’, in Kevin J. Vanhoozer (ed.), Dictionary for Theological Interpretation of the Bible, Grand Rapids/London: Baker/SPCK, pp. 84–90, here pp. 85–6.
[20] See Bartholomew, ‘Biblical Theology’.
[21] See Andrew Rogers, 2007, ‘Reading Scripture in Congregations: Towards an Ordinary Hermeneutics’, in Andrew Walker and Luke Bretherton (eds), 2007, Remembering our Future: Explorations in Deep Church, Milton Keynes: Paternoster, pp. 81–107; Andrew Village, 2007, The Bible and Lay People: An Empirical Approach to Ordinary Hermeneutics, Aldershot: Ashgate.
[22] Cf. Rogers, ‘Reading Scripture in Congregations’.
[23] On the theological function of preaching see also Trevor Pitt, 2010, ‘The Conversation of Preaching and Theology’, in Stevenson, Future of Preaching, pp. 65–83.
[24] On the connection between preaching and pastoral care see Michael J. Quicke, 2005, ‘The Scriptures in Preaching’, in Paul Ballard and Stephen R. Holmes (eds), The Bible in Pastoral Practice, London: Darton, Longman & Todd, pp. 241–57.
[25] See Michael J. Quicke, 2006, 360-degree Leadership: Preaching to Transform Congregations, Grand Rapids: Baker.
[26] ‘Because the word conveys the new humanity, by its very nature it is always directed towards the congregation. It seeks community, it needs community, because it is already laden with humanity’, Bonhoeffer, ‘The Proclaimed Word’, p. 35.
part 2
Introduction
The second stage of practical theology is called by Osmer ‘The Interpretive Task: Sagely Wisdom’.[1] This is the stage at which we bring various theories from the sciences or humanities to bear upon the phenomenon on we which we are reflecting, in order to be able to understand better from a human perspective what is going on. Thus in Chapters 3 and 4 I seek to interpret preaching with the aid of several theories related to human communication. We will consider aspects of language, media, rhetoric, sociology and psychology. If as theologians we are tempted to doubt the necessity or worth of this stage – preferring to move straight on to the next stage, in order to develop a theological perspective – the wisdom tradition of Scripture should be sufficient to convince us otherwise. Osmer gives an excellent account of the pertinence of the wisdom tradition to the practical theological task.[2]
Some might still feel, however, that preaching is such an irreducibly theological event that to postpone a properly theological consideration of it till Part 3 is to give in to reductionism. Are we not allowing our basic understanding to be dictated by ‘secular’ categories? I offer three responses to such a fear.
First, the phenomena of preaching which I seek to analyse here are, to my mind, thoroughly conditioned by God himself. In no sense do I regard preaching as merely a ‘secular’ occurrence. There is no wish to claim that the various ‘human’ categories applied to the study can fully encompass or explain the divine realities inherent in the event. In Osmer’s helpful analogy, human theories provide a map of the territory that may be found more or less suitable for the expedition, but they are not the territory itself,
